On Discrimination: Restoring Reality and Resurrecting Language

Language is what humans use to communicate to each other about reality, about the world we see around us. Reality, then, is made of words. It’s every noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, and adverb. Words, and the meaning we give them — or the meaning handed down to us by others — shape our view of the world. Unfortunately, this also makes it simple for people to distort our view of the world by misusing the same language that helps us to learn about it and understand it. Often, humans purposefully or accidentally communicate an incorrect meaning for the things happening in reality by choosing incorrect words to represent the event taking place.

This brings manipulation of the human mind into play. Some humans actually intend to commit fraud, to lie, and to distort the perceptions and worldviews of others, misusing language in a subtle way to alter how certain humans view events around them. It usually works best if the misuse of language synchronizes with an emotionally charged situation, where the people witnessing or experiencing it sit under a cloud of rage, fear, or uncertainty. Effective manipulation ties the wrong words to these emotions to later create triggers, setting those same people off into the same anger or panic they felt in the earlier situation. This emotional manipulation and subsequent reactions to this manipulation allows manipulators to predict the actions of the emotionally compromised in the future.

Sociopaths trying to rule others need this seemingly prophetic knowledge of human behavior because it makes it easier to figure out when they’re in panic mode due to heightened levels of fear, anger, anxiety, and uncertainty. When people think rationally, efficiently, and strategically, manipulators lose their ability to track their locations, determine their motivations, or accurately predict their next moves.

A key tool for manipulation of the masses comes in the form of propaganda that the ruling class, the state, puts forth. By constantly twisting and misusing language to this precise end, they effectively maintain control of the emotionally compromised majority. Innumerable words with glaringly contradictory meanings transform blatant lies into truth unless the person in question holds a wide vocabulary and the ability to understand context. I intend to take our language back from the manipulative liars in D.C. who wear the badge of the almighty government.

One obvious example of a word repeatedly associated with something it never originally meant is anarchy. People often think of chaos when the word comes up, and assume anarchy literally means chaos, and this is largely the fault of government propaganda and its influence in big media. Those sociopaths who want to rule need others to continue hallucinating that they have to be ruled, so they desperately need the idea of “no rulers” (which is all the word anarchy means) to be a terrifying notion. It’s certainly evident in the world around us today how much they’ve indeed succeeded in distorting the meaning of anarchy.

Anarchy is an obviously misused and abused word to libertarians and anarchists, but there are far more words in our language — even phrases — that have become twisted or manipulated over time into meaning something they don’t. I hope to resurrect and restore many words in our language that have been relentlessly tampered with, but there’s a word in particular that came to my attention during several thought experiments I did on the journey to becoming an anarchist.

One day, I was doing a thought exercise I had only very recently begun doing. I was using the notion of self-ownership in my head as a sort of philosophical measuring stick for one-on-one interaction between two human individuals. To wit, I was conjuring up various common interactions that two humans might engage in during everyday life, and attempting to play through varying scenarios determining which action by either of the two individuals would be the action that violated free will first. I was also consciously focusing these thought experiments on human interactions that often become the focus of a media story used to conjure emotions or are used by politicians as propaganda in order to justify more legislation (opinions backed by the threat of death).

At some point I remembered many of the various situations that occur between humans that get slapped under the category “discrimination”. As a young twenty-something western-world child, I was raised with the idea that discrimination is, of course, always bad. It was always a word in my head that conjured the typical media-and-school-propagated images of slaves on plantations, images of homosexuals or black people being told to leave restaurants, and the generic employee interview scene with someone who was obviously handicapped being turned down for a position. What I had sadly never done before was attempt to learn about the history of the use of the word or its true definition. I wanted to understand what people were trying to point to in reality when they used that word. I understood it made me feel bad to think about people “being discriminated against,” and I had vague thoughts of things “being unfair.”

This wasn’t enough information about the concept of discrimination to make a fair discernment on whether it’s actually bad or immoral, and I had never undergone the mental process of assessing the meaning of the word by looking at the actions it described. I set about looking at various situations in my head that usually garnered the eye of big media and the upset of the average person. I intended to look at one-on-one scenarios and to apply the notion of self-ownership (the idea it’s wrong to hit, steal, and kill as well as wrong to use a state agent to do that for you) to each action of the individuals involved.

I saw in my mind an independent restaurant owner going about his day, when a person stepped into his establishment to inquire about employment. The proprietor knows nothing about this person, but after some discussion decides in his own mind that he doesn’t think the man who stepped into his shop will be a good fit for the job. It’s his restaurant and he has a certain type of person in mind he likes to hire, having certain qualities, and this man is simply not the right fit. A good bit of his decision is coming from a close attention to detail, observation of the inquiring man’s body language and general years of experience that give him a certain intuitive sense about people. So, the man leaves the restaurant visibly upset the owner turned him down for work after a brief interview, though the owner didn’t say precisely why.

Then I imagined that in this scenario the man who inquired about work was homosexual. He decided he felt the owner somehow could tell he was a homosexual when he was interviewed by him (thought it was never explicitly communicated), and felt this must have been the reason he wasn’t hired. Whatever the thoughts of the owner were, all that actually occurred in the observable real-world situation is a restaurant owner decided not to hire a man for a position in his establishment.

However, the man who feels the owner turned him down because he is a homosexual decides to sue the owner for “discrimination.” What I realized in this moment as I saw the situation in my mind is that the man who didn’t get the position is now essentially using an agent of force (the state) to take money from the restaurant owner simply because the restaurant owner didn’t want to hire him, to have him on his property, and to give him his money. The owner can’t simply refuse to pay the money to the man if he’s sued and loses because the state will then take away the owner’s restaurant if he doesn’t pay. Eventually, the state would shut down his business, likely beginning with revocation of his licenses, and if the owner still doesn’t allow himself to be robbed, the state’s mercenaries would eventually forcibly remove him from his own restaurant and seize it under the color of “law.” So now, simply because one man didn’t want to be in the same room as another man and give him his money, the state is essentially saying, “We’re using the threat of guns to take your money and give it to someone else.”

A new thought then occurred to me upon seeing this scenario for what it was. What ultimately matters is that the man who owned his restaurant was on his own property, hurting no one, and had every right to choose not to associate with any other person and to make them vacate his property. It doesn’t even matter the reason he wants to not associate because it would not alter the fact that the aggressor in the scenario was the man who wanted to use the threat of force to rob the owner, to force the owner to give him his money or otherwise have his property taken from him (or even be imprisoned if he resisted).

The truth is, if one can make the claim that the threat of force is justified because of the reason why the owner wanted not to associate with the homosexual man, then this means that the man inquiring for employment gets to use the state to police the owner’s mind. If the owner isn’t permitted (or otherwise state agents will take his money) to say no to hiring a person for any reason he so chooses, then it follows he’s being persecuted and potentially prosecuted for his thoughts; his thoughts can be considered criminal and are grounds for his being extorted or caged.

It could easily be said it isn’t rational to hire or not hire someone on the basis of sexual orientation or race, but it must be allowed. Why?

Because to say it’s “not allowed”is to say that a person who has a thought or belief you don’t like is not allowed to say no to you being on his/her property or to say no to giving you his/her money. To use force to make them give you their money or let you on their property is called robbery and burglary by any other name, and using the state goons to back you up via lawsuits does not suddenly transform the act into a moral one.

The State makes choice illegal

I can’t even begin to describe what it felt like to realize that a word (discrimination) that I had been taught was referring to someone doing something bad — justifying them being fined or imprisoned — was actually just a word referring to someone having a thought in their head. Furthermore, that all over our supposedly “free” country, harmless people were being robbed by what are, in essence, Thought Police.

When I went to Wikipedia just to see what came up for the word discrimination, I was horrified to find that all the definitions given were recently developed modern ones that used paragraphs full of relativistic, vague adjectives to describe an overabundance of potential situations that discrimination could be used to describe. Yet not a single definition could precisely nail down what discrimination really was or how to easily point to it in the real world of actions. It was evident just from the cataclysmic catastrophe of the Wiki page that those editing that page had no real way to identify in reality what discrimination was.

What most alarmed me though was that in the rubble of logical blunders and philosophical mud, I found the actual small paragraph describing (and somewhat brushing over, dismissively) the etymology of the word. It is as follows, from the Wiki page:

The term discriminate appeared in the early 17th century in the English language. It is from the Latin discriminat- ‘distinguished between’, from the verb discriminare, from discrimen ‘distinction’, from the verb discernere.[5] Since the American Civil War the term “discrimination” generally evolved in American English usage as an understanding of prejudicial treatment of an individual based solely on their race, later generalized as membership in a certain socially undesirable group or social category.[6] “Discrimination” derives from Latin, where the verb discrimire means “to separate, to distinguish, to make a distinction”.

By this use of the word prior to the Civil War, we can see that discrimination is, in fact, a neutral word in essence. It simply means to distinguish between two or more things or make a distinction. This can be done verbally, but is ultimately originating in the mind.

So then, to discriminate is to make any real decision or choice because to make a decision about anything, you have to cut yourself off from other possibilities, and you have to use your mind to discern that the one option you choose is better than other routes for reasons that make it distinguishable it from the other choices. And you, the mind doing the determining, are using your mind to distinguish between the things you want and the choices you make and why.

When you buy a Ford, you discriminated against all the other makes and models of vehicle.

When you chose to eat the apple in your fridge and not anything else, you discriminated against all the other foods in your fridge.

When you choose to marry one man or woman, you discriminate against the other available men and women on earth.

When you hire one person, you discriminated against all the other persons you didn’t hire.

In fact, if you read the writings of people who used the word in their language before this last century, discrimination was very obviously and frequently used as a compliment to describe those persons who were good at discerning what was a good choice or a bad choice for themselves. “Discriminating individuals” were seen as those who were good at assessing the various qualities of a thing or person in regards to how that thing or person might fit their own needs or goals. They were seen as excellent decision-makers. That is all.

By completely ignoring the origins of this word and the original use of it and applying it to all manner of relativistic experiences and fluctuating human emotions, this word became used simply to trigger reactive, unthinking responses from most people — people who then become too lost in anger, indignation, or anxiety to be able to see through the murky water of rhetoric to the heart of the event, the truth of what is happening and the intent behind those in power using words this way.

Language is designed to describe reality, and precise language is important because it sticks to what’s really happening, to the actions and not the feelings generated, to the event and not the thoughts in peoples’ minds. When we lose our ability to communicate well about reality, we lose our ability to understand reality. There are those humans who would distort reality for the rest of us because it’s the only way to absolute control.

It’s time to take back our words. It’s time to remove the distortions. It’s time to see the real world again.

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